Re: Books for conlangers

Hi!

轡虫 (kutsuwamushi) <snapping.dragon@...> writes:
> I'd like to compile a list of book recommendations for conlangers, and
> I could use your help. I'm thinking of two categories:
>
> 1) Introductions to linguistics for beginners
> (General introductions and more advanced introductions to specific
> topics like phonetics, case, or whatever you find useful.)
>
> 2) Books that are good for inspiration
> (Books like Mithun's _Languages of Native North America_ or _The
> World's Writing Systems_, which contain a lot of information on more
> than one language. Books that are about specific language families,
> like _The Slavonic Languages_, would be good too.)
>
> Any comments you have on the books would be great, because I can't
> afford to review them all myself. =) If I compile enough
> recommendations, I'll upload the list to my website and share the
> link.
For 2):

Marianne Mithun: The Languages of Native North America.  Very large
book with a lot of input.  Very good.

Thomas E. Payne -- Describing Morphosyntax.  Very nicely written book
that given an overview of many, many features the worlds languages
have.  Thought to be for field linguists, it seems to be made for
conlangers who explore ideas.

Lyle Campbell -- Historical Linguistics.  Very valuable for a-posteriory
conlangs, since many, many processing involved in language changes are
described.  I'm currently still reading this.

All these books are probably not for beginners -- they all do use
quite some amount of linguistic vocab.

For special interest on particular languages, I also have:

Masayoshi Shibatani -- The languages of Japan.  Fascinating examples
of Ainu and a lot of information about Japanese.

Jerry Norman -- Chinese.  With explanations of old language, modern
language development, and a chapter about Modern Chinese.  I liked it.

**Henrik

Reply